How can we account for the durability of subsistence farming in China despite six centuries of vigorous commercialization from 1350 to 1950 and three decades of collectivization between 1950 to 1980? Why did the Chinese rural economy not undergo the transformation predicted by the classical models of Adam Smith and Karl Marx? In attempting to answer this question, scholars have generally treated commercialization and collectivization as distinct from population increase, the other great rural change of the past six centuries. This book breaks new ground in arguing that in the Yangzi delta,...

To what extent do newly available case records bear out our conventional assumptions about the Qing legal system? Is it true, for example, that Qing courts rarely handled civil lawsuits--those concerned with disputes over land, debt, marriage, and inheritance--as official Qing representations led us to believe? Is it true that decent people did not use the courts? And is it true that magistrates generally relied more on moral predilections than on codified law in dealing with cases? Based in large part on records of 628 civil dispute cases from three counties from the 1760's to the 1900's,...

To what extent do newly available case records bear out our conventional assumptions about the Qing legal system? Is it true, for example, that Qing courts rarely handled civil lawsuits--those concerned with disputes over land, debt, marriage, and inheritance--as official Qing representations led us to believe? Is it true that decent people did not use the courts? And is it true that magistrates generally relied more on moral predilections than on codified law in dealing with cases? Based in large part on records of 628 civil dispute cases from three counties from the 1760's to the 1900's,...

Drawing on archival records of actual cases, this study provides a new understanding of late imperial and Republican Chinese law. It also casts a new light on Chinese law by emphasizing rural areas and by comparing the old and the new. The book asks the question: What changes occurred and what remained the same in Chinese civil justice from the Qing to the Republic? Civil justice is here interpreted to mean not only codified law but also actual legal practice. Since the consequences of court actions frequently differed from the code's intent, this book also addresses the question of how legal...

The author presents a convincing new interpretation of the origins and nature of the agrarian crisis that gripped the North China Plain in the two centuries before the Revolution. His extensive research included eighteenth-century homicide case records, a nineteenth-century country government archive, large quantities of 1930's Japanese ethnographic materials, and his own field studies in 1980. Through a comparison of the histories of small family farms and larger scale managerial farms, the author documents and illustrates the long-term trends of agricultural commercialization, social...

This pioneering volume shows that contrary to previous scholarly understanding, the courts in Qing (1644-1911) and Republican (1911-1949) China dealt extensively with civil matters such as land rights, debt, marriage, and inheritance; and, moreover, did so in a consistent and predictable way. Drawing on records of hundreds of cases from local archives in several parts of China, it considers such questions as the relation between codified law and legal practice, the role of legal and paralegal personnel, and the continuity in civil law between Qing and Republican China.

The culmination of twenty years of research, this essential book completes distinguished historian Philip C. C. Huang's pathbreaking trilogy on Chinese law and society from late imperial times to the present. Huang shows how, at the level of ideology and theory, traditional Chinese law has been rejected time and again in the past century by China's own lawmakers, first in the late Qing and the republic, then in the revolutionary and Maoist periods of the People's Republic, and finally again in the current reform era. Considering legal theory alone, modern Chinese law can only be Western law,...

Legal history studies have often focused mainly on codified law, without attention to actual practice, and on the past, without relating it to the present. As the title--Research from Archival Case Records: Law, Society, and Culture in China--of this book suggests, the authors deliberately follow the research method of starting from court actions and only on that basis engage in discussions of laws and legal concepts and theory. The articles cover a range of topics and source materials, both past and present. They provide some surprising findings--about disjunctures between code and...